The story behind the Poppy project
History
The Poppy project was born in 2012 in the Flowers laboratory at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest. It was initiated during Matthieu Lapeyre’s PhD Thesis surpervised by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer.
This project is initially a fundamental research project financed by ERC Grant Explorer to explore the role of embodiment and morphology properties on cognition and especially on the learning of sensori-motor tasks.
Poppy is now maanged by the Poppy Station non-profit, promoting Robotics and Artificial Intelligence for Education, Arts and Research.
Philosophy
The Poppy project is a community-centered robotic project. It targets the needs of a multidisciplinary community where researchers, teachers, artists, and robotic enthusiasts can share their work and ideas.
Poppy tools are designed to be modular, easy to use, and easy to integrate – providing a set of building blocks that can be easily assembled and reconfigured.
Poppy places the people creativity and bottom-up project emergence at the heart of the robotic development.
Through its accessibility and its openness, the Poppy project contributes to make future technologies more democratic and transparent.
Contribution
If you want to take part in the Poppy project, the first step is to become a member of the community on the forum. It is a central place in the exchanges between users and contributors, where everyone is free to come talk about their projects and ideas.
There are many ways to contribute as the Poppy project involves a wide range of disciplines:
- Engineering fields such as computer science, mechanics, electronics, machine learning…
- Humanities such as cognitive science, psychology…
- Life science such as biology, biomechanics…
- Community management, scientific mediation, communication…
- Art, animation, design…
If you would like to contribute, you are very much welcome. Apart from sharing your own project, you can take a look at the project source code and call for contributions.
Advanced users can of course create issues to notify a problem or develop new features that can be integrated to the project.
Usage rights
All the technological developments made in the Poppy project are freely available under open source licenses. Only the use of the name “Poppy” is restricted and protected as an international trademark to protect its identity.
Please feel free to contact us for more information.